The former justice's suggestion comes after Saturday's "March for Our Lives" event that drew hundreds of thousands of young demonstrators and supporters to Washington and cities around the world. The rallies were in response largely to February's massacre by a gunman using a semiautomatic rifle at a Florida high school that left 17 people dead.

Stevens, a Republican Navy veteran, described the early history and language used in the Second Amendment, which describes "a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

But Stevens, who retired in 2010, called the Amendment "a relic of the 18th century."

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

He pointed out that the Supreme Court reinforced in 1939 that Congress could limit the possession of certain firearms -- at that time, it regarded ownership of a sawed-off shotgun -- because it "had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a 'well regulated militia.'"

Stevens claimed the ruling gave the powerful National Rifle Association a "propaganda weapon of immense power" and added that overturning it by repealing the Second Amendment would open the way to "constructive" gun control legislation.

Stevens concluded, "It would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States — unlike every other market in the world. It would make our schoolchildren safer than they have been since 2008 and honor the memories of the many, indeed far too many, victims of recent gun violence."